Hi everyone – welcome back to your [AI-generated] 3 Shifts Edition. A lot has changed in the past week, and the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America is not even the strangest.

In our first Shift: The long-promised tariffs have become real – at least for China. (The tariffs on Canada and Mexico were paused for 30 days.) Notably, the executive order clarifies that all items from China are no longer allowed to use the duty-free de minimis exemption (ahem, Temu and Shein).

Next, we take a look at the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as we know it. After the firing of Rohit Chopra, CFPB staffers were ordered to halt most of their work on rulemaking, enforcement actions, litigation, and communications.

Finally, everyone is talking about distillation and its impact on AI economics. A distilled model (e.g. DeepSeek) can be “up to 500% faster and 75% less expensive to run,” while losing less than 2% accuracy. Just this past week, a US-based team distilled a model that outperforms o1-preview for just $21 and in 26 minutes, using a dataset of just 1,000 questions.

One final note – check out the final report in our series collaboration with TDK Ventures: “The Opinionated CVC: A perspective on strategy, process and people.” It presents a slightly more “opinionated” perspective on how a CVC should be organized.

As always, if you have any feedback for us, feel free to hit ‘reply’ and let us know what you think.

Enjoy.

– Tam

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